


Of Adoptions

by spoke



Category: Yoroiden Samurai Troopers | Ronin Warriors
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 13:27:10
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1094381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spoke/pseuds/spoke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Many thanks to my beta-reader, Flamebyrd, who caught all the grammer goofs and confusions. It would be a poorer story without the help.</p><p>Also thanks to dre, for throwing a goofy starting sentence at me when I was stuck. It ended up actually getting written, if not in the way that it was meant. ;)</p>
    </blockquote>





	Of Adoptions

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Encyclopediac](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Encyclopediac/gifts).



> Many thanks to my beta-reader, Flamebyrd, who caught all the grammer goofs and confusions. It would be a poorer story without the help.
> 
> Also thanks to dre, for throwing a goofy starting sentence at me when I was stuck. It ended up actually getting written, if not in the way that it was meant. ;)

Once upon a time, there was a boy with five older brothers and one older sister. None of them were actually related to each other (thank goodness), but they had in time become a family.

One day, as the boy returned home from a trip to the market, he heard a cat. He might almost have missed it, in the noise of the evening, for the insects and frogs were all in full chorus. The sound stood out with a strange clarity, however, and he followed it easily to a small patch of bushes on the side of the road.

"Are you here, kitty? Kitty, kitty - hello!" He smiled at the white nose cautiously poking out from beneath the leaves, and held his hand out to be sniffed. Once it decided to come out, he petted it gently and looked around. "I wonder where you came from. There aren't any houses this way except ours, and we only have White Blaze."

The cat mewled pitifully, and the boy looked at it for a minute. "You know something? You could come home with me, if you want. The worst Mia could do is say no, right?"

The cat leaped onto his shoulder in response, and if it felt a bit heavier than it should for a minute, the boy thought no more of that than he had of the clarity of its cries. "Alright, then," he laughed, "my name's Yuli!"

* * * * *

Coming through the door, the first thing he saw was that Ryo and Mia were both already home, and White Blaze was lying by the fire. "Hi, guys!" He called, trying to get the cat off of his shoulders, which it had refused to come off of the entire walk home. "Guess what I found!"

Ryo laughed as he came over to help Yuli untangle the cat's claws from his shirt. "A tiny furry leech, it looks like. C'mon, let go of the kid little guy." He gently got hold of the scruff of its neck, and managed to free Yuli even though it didn't seem inclined to let go. "You're a stubborn little thing, aren't you?"

The cat's mewing response had a distinctly complaining tone that set them both laughing.

They both realized Mia had left the room only as she came back in with a saucer of milk. "Well, it can't live on Yuli's shoulders. He'll have to go to sleep sometime!"

"But I can keep him, right Mia? He's so cute and he's hungry, and there was nobody nearby - I found him on the road coming back home.'' Yuli was doing his best at a pitiful expression, and the cat, looking up from the emptied saucer, mewled pitifully as if joining in. "Please?"

Ryo and Mia looked at each other; Mia smiled and shrugged, and Ryo glanced over to the fire. "As long as White Blaze is okay with it, I don't mind."

"Alright, then. We'll have to let the others see it too, and decide, but first let's let White Blaze see." She gently coaxed the cat into letting her pick it up, properly instead of being a scarf. Mia brought it over to the tiger, Ryo and Yuli both right behind her.

White Blaze looked up sleepily and sniffed the cat, who had frozen in Mia's arms. A long moment of tense silence followed before the tiger put his head down with what Ryo thought was an amused look, and the cat scrambled out of Mia's arms to examine him.

"Well. That settles it for me, Mia," Ryo said, scratching White Blaze behind the ears and wishing, not for the first time, that his friend could talk.

* * * * *

Kento and Cye coming in for the day brought the first sign of trouble. While the cat responded nicely enough to Cye, purring and wrapping itself around his legs (possibly because it smelled the fish he'd brought home), it hissed at Kento and stayed completely out of his reach for several minutes. Eventually it ended up disappearing upstairs.

Which is where Cye found Kento locked in an argument with it when he finally left the kitchen, having set the fish to cook for their dinner.

"Come on, cat. I'm not even doing anything!"

The hissing in response suggested otherwise. Cye frowned, looking between Kento sulking near the door and the shadow crouched right against the wall beneath a chest of drawers. "It really doesn't like you, though."

"I can tell that, man. I just want to know why."

"Well I can't tell you that, love. What I can suggest is this," he said, handing Kento a bowl of scraps. "Don't try to make it come out, just hold the bowl for a minute so it'll smell like you? And let it form a positive association."

He paused before heading back downstairs. "And don't hang around waiting for it come out, either. Come back down!"

Kento mock-glared at his back. "Man, kicked out of our room by a cat. This is a new low." Crouching down in front of the still-hissing shadow, he muttered, "You better appreciate this," before leaving the saucer.

Hearing the hissing stop and the tiny sound of sniffing only helped a little.

* * * * *

When Sage returned, he said and did nothing about the cat beyond raising an eyebrow and nodding.

What none of them said anything about was spotting him later, shortly before Rowen came downstairs, playing with a ball of yarn and a tiny determined blur of white. Rowen didn't even say anything to tease him, it was so rare to see Sage smiling.

Ryo said it was probably his making up for the rest of them not being serious enough, but Yuli and Kento both figured it was because he was wound too tight and needed to relax. That was the first solid benefit they saw to having the cat around, though when Cye asked at dinner, Sage said it was good to have something keeping down mice.

"Yeah, because we have a real problem with those," Kento whispered in Cye's ear as he passed with his plate. 

Cye only rolled his eyes and gave Kento a warning look, which he shrugged off with a grin.

The last they saw of the cat that night, he was curled up as close to the fire as he could get, since White Blaze actually took up most of the available fireside space.

* * * * *

Well, the last most of them saw of it. Rowen, for as long as any of them had known him, had slept through most of the day and gone out at night. Most of his problems in life, prior to the formation of their family, had come from that and people's suspicions about it.

Now at least he had a safe place to store his star-gazing equipment, and living so far from the nearest town was as much for his benefit as for Ryo and White Blaze - there were no lights to ruin his studies.

What he was looking for, he wasn't really sure. Mostly he just liked it, though Kento, who had known him longest, teased that he was a fae-child who'd fallen from a star and was looking for his way home.

He only realized the cat had followed him when he paused for a break and noticed he felt warmer than he usually did at night. He laughed softly and scratched its head, but otherwise didn't bother moving it.

"Keeping warm, little guy? You'd have done better with Kento or Ryo, they put out heat like nobody's business. 'Specially Ryo." He snorted at that thought, amused at the fleeting memories of past adventures, before he reached down to get his papers and pencil back.

He might need to get some more sleep tomorrow, though. He could almost have sworn that the cat was trying to read his notebook, and that was just paranoid.

* * * * *

After that life continued on as it had for the most part, and they could almost have forgotten the addition of the cat if it weren't for little oddities.

Like White Blaze occasionally coming by with it carried in his mouth, for all the world like an impossibly tiny and very put-out tiger cub.

Or small odds and ends going missing, that Cye seemed to think were not the sort of thing cats usually grabbed - though Sage argued that it wasn't as if there were a rule about what might and might not catch a cat's attention.

* * * * *

None of which would have mattered much, or even been thought of later, if it hadn't been for Rowen's notebooks vanishing. He'd been so much the stable one in the face of all the insanity they’d been through before that his reaction to this took everyone by surprise.

"This isn't the sort of thing I'd mess around about, Sage!" he snapped as his friend listed out the places they'd already checked, and it was probably the hard light in Sage's visible eye that stopped it becoming a tirade.

Cye and Kento had already left to go check his star-gazing field before the sun went down, and Ryo had left not long after Mia, to check discreetly around town about it.

Though Sage doubted both that this could be a discreet inquiry and that Ryo could pull off subtle at all, but that was Mia's problem now.

The cat somehow managed to sleep through all the noise, tucked away on the highest shelf in Rowen's room, which he'd retreated to as soon as the noise started.

* * * * *

“You know, I really don’t think we’re going to find anything out here,” Cye said, shaking his head at the tracks in the ground that had proved to be theirs. “Really we’re just going in circles.” 

Kento wiped the sweat of his forehead and clapped Cye on the back as he stood. “Looks like it, man. But I want to keep trying while there’s still daylight. Maybe it’ll be less confusing with just one of us?”

The look Cye shot him would have made Sage proud for sheer skepticism. “Well...” he trailed off, shaking his head and looking back to the house. One thing he and Kento had always agreed on was that a full stomach made people a lot calmer, and he knew they were both thinking of the edge that hunger was going to put on Ryo and Rowen’s temper. Sage at least could be relied on to control himself.

“If you really want to? Just be careful.” The look that came with those words was as good as a kiss.

“Hey, aren’t I always?” Kento shook his head. “No, really, I’ll watch it. Not like anything’s gonna sneak up on me out here.” he said, waving a hand at the grassy fields surrounding them.

He kissed Cye before heading away from the tracks they’d beaten around Rowen’s star-gazing spot. Cye shook his head again as he went back to the house, hoping everything had cooled down. Or that someone else had started cooking, at least.

* * * * *

Kento had just begun to feel like he was getting somewhere when the falling night forced him to head back in. There was a feeling of something that didn’t belong to the earth here, but he hadn’t been able to pin it down - partly because of the cleansing effect of Cye’s magic. He was so caught up in his own head, prying at that off-feeling, that he nearly lost his way heading home.

Stopping in a small patch of woods he hoped was near the house, he looked up at the sky in irritation. If he’d taken up Rowen’s offer of learning to navigate by the stars, he could’ve used that. He didn’t want to do anything to disturb his memory of what felt off in the field, and using his own powers to find home probably would...

But there really wasn’t anything else for it. Otherwise, he’d have everyone freaking out about losing _him_. So he went as still as he could, and reached out to the land around him - and freaked out a little bit himself.

Breathing in hard, pushing back the anger, he let his focus go deeper. Out of his own body, into the land’s memory. Only the recent memory, he doubted this had been going on long, but he needed to be sure of what he was seeing if he wanted to figure out the how. 

A pattern of footsteps, or paw prints. The tracks said four feet, but the weight rested on two. It crossed the woods here repeatedly, and it wasn’t too far from the house. Kento’s eyes opened slowly, and he heard himself speaking in the earth’s low rumble, “I don’t know who you are...” before the magic released him as he had released it, “but you are in one hell of a lot of trouble, pal.”

* * * * *

He’d meant to walk into the house as casually as he could, get the others and tell them what he’d seen. He had no idea what the damned not-a-cat would turn out to actually be, after all. 

Except he never got the chance. Coming up to the back of the house, he nearly stepped on it - or would have had it not been in the process of revealing itself far too large to step on. White fur somehow slipped and shrank in ways that hurt Kento’s eyes as the kitten became a man; long white hair fell around the shoulders of a frame maybe half a head taller than Kento’s, and one pale eye glared into his. At least for the brief moment when it was open, before Kento punched him. 

During the struggle that followed, Kento was distantly aware that he could hear the other guys, that they must have heard the noise and come running, but he was focused on bringing the stranger down. By the time they made it around the house, he’d gotten the creep pinned, and wished he could look away to enjoy their expressions.

As it was, he had to interrupt the soft murmur of congratulations and generally what-the-heck with a question for his prisoner. “Where is it,” 

He almost expected him to sound like the cat, but his voice was quite - well, not _quite_ human, but still within a normal range. “Where is what.” he responded in contempt, and shifted his weight as if he were about to try throwing Kento off.

Which is when Rowen started _glowing_ a bit, and Kento had to grin a little that the stranger drew back just as much as everyone else. Or tried to, anyway. “Where are my notebooks, is what I think he’s askin’. Because you’re not leaving here without handing them over.” 

The stranger’s good eye narrowed, and Kento felt him getting even more tense - there was more going on here that he didn’t understand, that maybe none of them, than he’d realized. Figuring that out could wait until they got the notebooks back, though. “If you _insist_. Much good may they do you, with all _your_ memories.” 

At which point he seemed to shift, and Kento was left crouching on top of the small pile of all Rowen’s notebooks, blinking in confusion just before the light around his friend winked out and Sage and Ryo caught him. 

Ryo looked at him over Rowen’s shoulder. “What the hell was that, man?”

“Like I even know, man. All _I_ know right now is that he was the cat,” Kento muttered, carefully moving himself off the notebooks so as not to damage them. 

Sage, not unexpectedly, hissed under his breath at that. “Alright. War council whenever Rowen wakes up. Meanwhile, we put someone on watch again. This is ridiculous!” 

“You’re telling me, man? I just fought a shape-shifting cat guy. ..only, I don’t think that was it exactly, because his weight never changed...” Kento told them, and listening to Mia lock the door behind them, felt a little bit guilty at his excitement. 

But only a little, even with Cye eyeing him with a pretty impressive mix of irritated and ruefully fond.

**Author's Note:**

> I tried to aim for a sort of not quite modern day au, with technology a little behind ours but not by much. I am not sure that came across. 
> 
> The magic is actually not the armors, but elemental inclinations that are pretty rare - and not to be overdone, because they can make the users become something other than human. What that might be depends on one's element. ...Kento's joke about Rowen's background? Not that far off. 
> 
> Also, White Blaze totally knows something is off. He is just keeping an eye on things without interfering for reasons of cryptic. Seriously, I wish I knew. Always fun side-eyeing one's characters.


End file.
